Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
Today let me show you how to use the new Safari 14 Start Page.
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So Safari 14 is the new version of Apple's browser.
It works not only in macOS Big Sur but also is an upgrade for Catalina and Mojave.
You can check in Safari, About Safari and see your version there.
Now you can get to the Start Page many different ways.
You could always go to Bookmarks and Show Start Page to get there.
When you first upgrade you'll get this welcome message to tell you some of the new features
in Safari including Customizable Start Page.
I'm going to dismiss that so we just see the Start Page as we normally would.
Now Start Page replaces Top Sites which showed you some of your most frequently visited sites
and allowed you to pin ones to that list so that they stayed there.
Start page basically has that and much more.
You have different sections here.
Favorites, Frequently Visited, Privacy Report, Siri Suggestions, Reading List, and iCloud
Tabs.
You can control which ones are shown by clicking on the controls at the bottom right.
You can also Control click in a blank space and you get check boxes next to each one of
these.
Now the first is Favorites.
Favorites is simply a Bookmarks folder.
If you go to Bookmarks and then you look down here to your Bookmarks, Favorites should be
first and under it you should see everything in Favorites.
You can completely customize this and put what you want there.
Let's go to a new page, for instance, and let's say I want to add this to my Favorites.
I can go to Bookmarks and Add Bookmark or just Command D. Then I want to make sure the
location where I'm saving the Bookmark to is Favorites.
Then I can change its name.
I can edit it down to make it something simple like that and click Add.
Now when I go to the Start page I'll see that site there.
You can completely customize this by going to Bookmarks, Edit Bookmarks, and then look
under Favorites here and I'll see everything.
I can change the names.
I can change the destinations.
I can select one and hit the Delete key to delete it.
I can move them around as well.
So you have complete control over what appears here under Favorites.
Here's a tip for using Favorites.
If you have a subfolder, like News and Popular are subfolder, inside of the Bookmarks Favorites
folder, you can click on them here and it will dive down into it and then you have a
Back button.
So you can really put a lot of links right here.
You can put all of your Bookmarks under Favorites and have access to them on the Start Page.
To create a subfolder go to Edit Bookmarks.
Inside of Favorites here you can click New Folder and then create something here and
then add Bookmarks to that or you can drag and drop existing Bookmarks into this folder.
Now under this you've got Frequently Visited.
Favorites and Frequently Visited can be combined to basically recreate what you had with your
Start Page.
Favorites would be equivalent to things that are pinned, things you always want to see
here at the top.
Frequently Visited will show you little previews of websites that you go to often.
Next down we see Privacy Report.
This is a new feature in Safari 14.
You can click on this and get a report of sites you've visited and things like advertising
trackers that they are using.
Under that you've got Siri Suggestions.
This will be like Frequently Visited except it will pull out URL's from things like emails
and messages that you've gotten recently and show you them here so you can quickly access
them.
Under that you've got Reading List.
Of course you can always access Reading List here on the left by clicking on this button
and then going to the Reading List sidebar and you could see all of that here.
But you could also have Reading List included here in your Start Page.
You could click on Show More to expand that or Show Less.
Finally you've got iCloud Tabs.
So this is the ability to see which browser tabs you have open in other devices.
So maybe your iPhone, iPad, and other Mac.
You can click here to switch to another device.
So this is really handy if you were looking at a webpage on one device, switch to another.
You can go to the Start Page and look here and quickly jump to that page.
Now all of this can be customized and you probably do want to customize it because there's
a lot of things here.
It would be more useful if you only had the things that you wanted.
So, for instance, I may keep Favorites and make sure I have the exact sites that I want
to see on the Start Page in my Favorites folder in Bookmarks.
But I may not want to have Frequently Visited or the Privacy Report.
Maybe I don't want Siri Suggestions and it's pretty easy to get to Reading List.
But I do like iCloud Tabs.
So having just these two turned on would make it most useful for me.
Others might have want to have Reading List on and maybe Favorites off and make the Start
Page basically a way to get to pages that you have added to your Reading List.
Now any way you customize this you have the ability to add a background.
You can turn background image on or off.
You can use one of these existing backgrounds here.
So for instance I can pick this first one here and it adds it as a nice background.
I could also click this button here and then add any image I want.
I have a picture here on my desktop I could select that.
You could see that gets added as my background.
So it's another place to kind of have a wallpaper of some image that you like.
Now I mentioned that there are many ways to get to the Start Page.
Of course you can use this menu item here.
You can assign a keyboard shortcut to that since it's a menu item.
You can also go into Safari Preferences and under General, when you Open New windows,
you can have it automatically go to the Start Page.
Also when you open new Tabs you can have it go to the Start page.
So all I need to do to get to the Start Page is, if I'm looking at a website and I want
to go to the Start Page but I don't want to go away from this website, I just create a
new Tab, I'll just use Command T to do that, and you can see my Start Page fills that blank
page there.
So I rarely ever have to go to Bookmarks, Show Start Page.
I just open up a new Tab.
Now here are a few more tips.
You can Control click or two finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse to
get more options for just about everything in here.
So, for instance, if I Control click on anything under Favorites I have the ability to open
it in a Tab, a Window.
I can rename or change the location for any Bookmark right there.
I can Copy the address or delete it.
For Frequently Visited I can also open in a new Tab or Window and Copy and Delete.
I could also change Frequently Visited to be icons if I wanted it to be that way instead
of a preview.
Under Reading List I can Control click and Open in a new Tab or Window and also Remove
an item from the Reading List.
Under iCloud tabs I can Control click and Open a New Tab or a new Window.
So I hope you found this look at using Start Page useful.
I know if you've been used to Top Sites that it's a little bit of an adjustment to make.
But I think in general this Start Page is a more versatile page than Top Sites.